All three were wildly
popular, enormously crowd-pleasing entertainments; but studios zeroed
in early on Die Hard as the most repeatable phenomenon. Hosts of Die Hard imitators — as well as a pair of sequels — were pitched and marketed as “Die Hard on a train / plane / mountain / river / bus etc.” (respectively, Passenger 57, Under Siege, Cliffhanger, The River Wild, and Speed).

Unfortunately,
few if any of these would-be “Try Hards” and “Fly Hards” (including the
sequels) approached the original film’s level of wit, excitement, and
interest (the notable exception being Speed, the first post–Die Hard action-adventure blockbuster to step out from the earlier film’s shadow and become something fresh).

Critics of Die Hard
complain that the movie is manipulative and contrived, at times wildly
implausible, and peopled by two-dimensional characters. So it is. But
the manipulation works; the characters are on their own level
thoroughly engaging; and concerns about plausibility are swept away
like tumbleweeds before a freight train by the strength of the premise,
the wit of the dialogue, and the rip-roaring set pieces. Die Hard
may not be a great film, but it’s a corker of a movie. For an evening
of edge-of-your-seat entertainment, you’d be hard pressed to do much
better.

Another potential issue is the intense violence and vulgar, sometimes profane dialogue.
The violence, though, is framed within a moral context — a police
officer must use deadly force in self-defense and in defense of the
lives of innocent hostages — and the experience of going through the
hero’s crisis with him, vicariously passing through the valley of the
shadow of death before emerging in triumph with evil defeated and hope
restored, is a satisfyingly cathartic experience. There’s also an
underlying moral subtext in the theme of the hero’s troubled
relationship with his wife and their stumbling, awkward efforts to
overcome their difficulties, and the reckoning that this event
occasions for both of them (as well as others around them).

But all of this is in the background. Part of what makes Die Hard so different from earlier action blockbusters of the same era — from Star Wars and Raiders to Rambo and Aliens
— is the fact that, unlike the heroes of the earlier films, NYPD
detective John McClane (Bruce Willis in a signature role) hasn’t set
out on some quest or crusade to right some wrong, recover some great
good, and/or destroy some great evil — to rescue the princess, recover
the ark, find the POWs, destroy the aliens, destroy the Death Star,
defeat the Nazis, pay back the Vietcong.

Instead, he finds himself unexpectedly besieged by an
invading evil he wasn’t looking for, fighting for his own survival and
that of others. And this insidious evil takes the form, not of exotic
villains of another world or time — stormtroopers, Nazis, aliens, even
Vietcong — but something much more immediate: terrorists and high-tech
criminals.

No mystical artifacts or supernatural forces aid McClane: no ark, lightsaber, Force, or shekinah
glory and destroying angel. The factors here are all mundane: guns,
explosives, helicopters. And the authorities — the police and the FBI —
who ought to be doing their utmost to rescue him and his fellow
captives, are almost to a man incompetent buffoons or callous yahoos,
in either case playing right into the villains’ hands. He’s completely
on his own.

While some of these same observations could also be applied, for example, to John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) in Rambo: First Blood Part II,
as a hero Rambo was a strictly old-school figure in the tradition of
characters played by John Wayne, Johnny Weismuller, Clint Eastwood, and
Gary Cooper: stoic, fearless, impassive, awesomely capable, and
(despite a scene of physical torture) practically invulnerable.

By contrast, John McClane is a much more human hero
who gets overwhelmed, panics, makes mistakes, reproaches himself,
hesitates, suffers brutal injuries, and tries desperately to think one
step ahead. A few earlier leading men, notably Jimmy Stewart and
Humphrey Bogart, played heroes with some of these attributes; but
perhaps they were never pressed so hard as John McClane. Jimmy
Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard might have had to stand up to bullying
Liberty Valance, but he at least had Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) backing
him up. Nobody’s backing up McClane. He’s as completely on his own as
Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, but without that anonymous hero’s
aura of invincibility.

Oddly, none of Die Hard’s many imitators attempted to
duplicate this key trait: Steven Segal, Wesley Snipes, and the other
action heroes who followed in Willis’s footsteps tended to be as
impassively heroic as Rambo. (So for that matter did Keanu Reeves in Speed
— but that movie cleverly compensated with Sandra Bullock’s
delightfully down-to-earth commuter, who panicks and freaks out even
more engagingly than Bruce Willis, but likewise rises to the occasion.)

Die Hard slyly acknowledges the way it’s playing
with motion-picture heroism in a key exchange between John McClane and
criminal mastermind Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman, also in a signature
role). This exchange is part of one of Die Hard key
innovations: McClane has taken out one of Gruber’s men and captured a
walkie-talkie, allowing him not only to eavesdrop on Gruber and his men
but also to address him directly, taunting him like a prank caller in
an effort to psyche him out.

But Gruber, unflappably suave and sophisticated in his Armani
suit, is not so easily thrown off balance. “This is very kind of you,”?
he says in measured tones when McClane first begins baiting him. “But
you have me at a loss. You know my name but who are you? Just another
American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a
bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne? Rambo? Marshall Dillon?”?

“I was always kinda partial to Roy Rogers actually,”? McClane
banters, tacitly acknowledging his status as an offbeat cowboy hero.
Later, asked via radio by a sympathetic outside cop what he’d like to
be called, McClane responds, “Call me… Roy.”?

This direct, anonymous interaction between the hero and the villain is electrifying, and is a crucial element in Die Hard’s success. (This device was widely copied in later movies, for the most part unsuccessfully, the exception being In the Line of Fire,
where the role of the phantom caller reverted to the villain [John
Malkovich], who taunted the hero [Clint Eastwood] over the phone.)

Another major element of Die Hard’s appeal lies in
watching John McClane figure out how to solve each new problem that
comes his way. There’s a unique appeal to stories of of problem-solving
in extreme circumstances, like the one about that Vietnam POW who
managed to slip a hidden message into a Vietcong propaganda film by
blinking his eyes in Morse code to spell the word “torture.”? Chronicle
Books publishes a small volume called The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook
that offers pointers on how to survive if trapped in a sinking car,
attacked by a bear, jumping from a moving train, and more. Even if you
never anticipate being in any of those scenarios, it makes fascinating
reading.

Die Hard has a similar appeal. It’s “How to
Survive Being Taken Hostage in a Corporate High-rise by Deadly
Terrorists”?; and if some of McClane’s techniques wouldn’t be
recommended by the Worst Case Scenario experts, they’re none
the less entertaining for that. Step by step, McClane has to improvise
ways of evading the terrorists, summoning the authorities, surviving
machine-gun assaults, alerting an unsuspicious cop to the presence of
trouble, and so on; and his solutions are often clever, even startling.

Still another component of the movie’s power is its tightly focused setting (a single skyscraper). The second Die Hard
movie occupied a more expansive setting (a large airport and
surrounding area), while the third one sprawled across Manhattan. As
the series progressed, the physical space occupied by the plot
increased, but the dramatic energy dissipated. The first film is the
most tightly circumscribed, and still packs the biggest wallop.

Die Hard also pleases by allowing small but
satisfying opportunities for heroism and triumph to its likable
supporting characters. This applies to McClane’s lone ally on the
outside, the heavyset, Twinkie-loving Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald
VelJohnson), and even to Argyle (De’voreaux White), the funky limo
driver who likes Run-DMC. Most of all, it applies to
McClane’s wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), who becomes the advocate for her
coworkers in their perilous circustance, standing up to Gruber and even
winning his grudging respect.

“What idiot put you in charge?”? he mutters without looking up
when she first approaches him with a series of requests. Her response
gets his attention: “You did. When you murdered my boss.”?

In doing her part, Holly has a kind of secret solidarity with
her phantom husband, though she knows she’s also playing a dangerous
game: If Gruber finds out she’s the wife of the mysterious
troublemaker, she’ll be in serious jeopardy while also becoming a
liability to John.

Die Hard isn’t beyond criticism, nor is it for
everyone. The violence, though in principle justified on the part of
the hero, is extreme and sometimes bloody, and not for the squeamish.
It might be argued that the film glorifies violence, but the violence
generally serves the plot rather than the other way around (the
sequels, especially the third one, are another story). The language is
problematic, but not too unreasonable given the characters and their
milieu; still, it’s not appropriate for impressionable young viewers
likely to be positively impressed by McClane’s swaggering use of
obscenity.

It’s possible to criticize the movie on other fronts. Many
have felt, for instance, that the character of Deputy Chief Dwayne T.
Robinson (Paul Gleason, then best known as the principal from The Breakfast Club — a role he recently reprised for Not Another Teen Movie) is too broadly caricatured, too ridiculous. The FBI agents are likewise unredeemed swine.

Still,
as you watch the film, its strengths have a way of steamrolling over
such criticisms. McClane is smart and gutsy and likable, Gruber
chillingly reserved and dangerously soft-spoken, and the interplay
between them is riveting. The bad guys’ master plan is clever and
elegant, their preparation and competence formidable. The action is
fast and furious, but never random or chaotic. To top it all off,
virtually all the characters who matter get what they deserve, from
liberation from guilt to a punch in the nose.

Almost fifteen years later, Die Hard remains the standard by which action movies are judged.